Tag: dystopian

Icebreaker by Lian Tanner Feiwel and Friends, 2015 (orig. 2013). Hardcover 304 pages “Twelve-year-old Petrel is an outcast, the lowest of the low on the Oyster, an ancient icebreaker that has been following the same course for three hundred years. In that time, the ship’s crew has forgotten its original purpose and broken into three warring…

Orleans by Sherri L. Smith G.P. Putnam’s Sons (Penguin), 2013 Hardcover, 324 pages. After a string of devastating hurricanes and a severe outbreak of Delta Fever, the Gulf Coast has been quarantined. Years later, residents of the Outer States are under the assumption that life in the Delta is all but extinct… but in reality,…

Uglies by Scott Westerfield Scholastic Press, 2005. paperback, 448 pages. borrowed. There is, very probably a canon of Young Adult reads. The sort of collection where if you want to be taken seriously as a reader of YA you must have read certain authors and titles. Scott Westerfield’s Uglies series is on it—as it should…

Too bad the title does not necessary imply divergence from present popular Young Adult formulations. Work-shopped from an outline and a list of ingredients came to mind as I grit my way through this one. Is the imaginative twist on post-apocalyptic dystopian construction of society enough to forgive the seams? Likely. More, its saving grace…

To begin: When the publisher claims at the end of their synopsis that Jesse Ball’s “The Curfew is a mesmerizing feat of literary imagination,” you may think it an excitable exaggeration. It isn’t. Nor is Minneapolis Star-Tribune’s observation that “There seems to be no other novelist writing today who is capable of so thoroughly disarming one’s narrative…

[So I finished Mockingjay and still got things done. Really it isn’t too lengthy, and Collins writes a compelling story. Further comments will come sooner than later I hope.] Today I want to highly recommend to most all readers (and readers of omphaloskepsis, of course) to read Caragh O’Brien’s Birthmarked. I suppose I should give…